The person keeping a tradition may be carrying work others remember only as atmosphere.

What one person did, everybody else recalls as a feeling. The candles, the smell of the kitchen, the sense that the house was ready: those memories are real, and they were manufactured by somebody who was awake early and is not in anyone’s picture of the day. Being remembered as atmosphere is a strange fate, and the people it happens to rarely correct the record.

If you can identify who that person was in your own family, tell them what you remember and ask what it took. If it is you, it is fair to say so out loud, and fairer still to hand a piece of it on.